HRT does not take delivery of its three trucks

The current situation arose from the fact that the order was not officially placed by the current team: it was Adrian Campos, with whom CECSA had previously worked, who verbally placed the order before passing the project to its current owner.

If three trucks are covered in cobwebs at the CECSA factory, HRT does indeed have three trucks that it moves on European circuits. An order must have been placed with another supplier. The trucks in question have the particularity of being registered in the Netherlands, which might mean that they are only rentals and not outright purchases.

However, the Spanish entrepreneurs had met Jose Ramon Carabante shortly after the acquisition, who had assured Victor Mendez, the owner of the supplier, that everything would be sorted out: «Seeing that we couldn’t move forward, we had a first meeting with Jose Ramon Carabante, who assured us he would fix everything. But since then, we’ve had meeting after meeting, the last one a few weeks ago during the tests at Montmelo, and we still don’t have any solutions.»

The question is all the more awkward for CECSA as it is only a limited family structure and the 300,000 euros in equipment investments on the three trucks ready to be delivered represent a significant financial burden: « We haven’t signed anything, but many documents prove that everything was ordered by them. If it had been an Italian team and not a Spanish one, we would have applied our commercial policy “after the rooster crows, the hen follows.” But we had the illusion of a Spanish team in Formula 1, so now we are in this difficult situation. »

This nevertheless represents only a small part of the disputes the team must face, a situation that is unlikely to improve if the drivers, Vitantonio Liuzzi and Narain Karthikeyan, are not able to pass the critical 107% mark in qualifying…

With the participation of RacingBusiness.fr